[Secret Project] Chapter 5

Dupes Chapter 5: Blue Screen of Death

Moh looked between me and the other me. He rubbed his forehead, as though trying to knead away a pounding headache.

“Explain,” he said.

“Twins!” my new clone blurted. “We’re twins.”

“This is my brother Fr…anz. Franz!” I caught myself at the last second. I’d been about to call him Fred, but I was supposed to be playing the part of Fred right now. I didn’t want Moh to think I was the wrong twin. He was brandishing that pistol again. And giving him my real name seemed like an equally bad idea right now.

“He’s Fr…ed,” Franz said helpfully.

Moh scowled. “You both reek of bullshit. What were you doing skulking around back there, Fr-anz?” He looked at the prosthetic hand Franz clutched to his chest. “And what the hells is that?”

“Oh, this?” Franz said. “Well, uh…”

Moh snatched the prosthetic, then dropped it with a startled curse when its fingers began to twitch. His boot came down hard. A metal finger pinged across the wharf, and the hand went still. He lifted a tiny camera lens that had fallen off the device. “Know what I think? I think—”

Before he could share his thought, the sound of aggressive shouting from the street outside cut into his words. A voice blasted from a loudspeaker. “This is the enforcers! Exit the wharf with your hands in the air. You have three minutes to comply.”

The warehouse hid the street from our view, but now I could see multicoloured lights flashing through the windows on the other side of the building. The shouts from out front were accompanied by an ominous whirring sound.

Moh rounded on me. “You! You went to the motherfucking blues!”

“Um, no?” I said. It was probably Lucie and Jaheem who had brought the enforcers down on us, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. “Before, you said you’d know it if I talked to them. And if I had spoken to them, I sure as shit wouldn’t have come back here now, would I?”

He held up the camera lens. “Then explain this, you little—”

One of the toughs put his hand on Moh’s shoulder. “We don’t got time for this, Moh. The blues are at the gate. What do we do?”

Moh rubbed his forehead for a long moment before answering. “Ready the boat. We’re getting out of here. And as for them…” He glanced between me and Franz. “…they won’t be talking to anyone. Sorry kids, but this is where it—fuck’s sake, what is it now?” He gawped at the sight of a service mech lumbering across the slippery deck of the docked ship.

Taking advantage of Moh’s distraction, I lunged at him. At the same moment, Franz twisted in the grip of the thug holding him, clawing at his eyes.

Moh was a pretty big guy, but my inelegant attack caught him completely off guard. My shoulder slammed into his chest while I awkwardly pawed at his pistol. With a grunt of surprise, he stumbled into one of the toughs, and they both pitched into the water, cursing loudly. Moh’s weapon clattered across the wharf, before vanishing over the edge after him.

Franz wasn’t so lucky. His attempt to take down the second goon ended with a spray of bullets to the chest.

He fell in a limp heap. And then, with a pop of displaced air, he simply…vanished. The blood that moments ago had sprayed across the rain-slicked wharf was gone. His clothes were gone. Even Lucie’s smashed prosthetic was gone.

“…the fuck?” the goon said, staring down at the spot where Franz had been.

My thoughts exactly. Except those thoughts were interrupted by a rush of new memories. Franz’s memories had deviated from my own for only a few minutes, but what they lacked in duration, they more than made up for in awfulness. I now knew what it felt like to have bullets shred my insides. The shock and confusion. The spreading numbness. The ringing in my ears, and the sudden dissipation of thought.

With an effort of will, I shoved the memory aside and focussed on the immediate task of not dying again. The guy who had shot Franz had recovered from the shock of seeing a body disappear into thin air, and was swinging his submachine gun around to finish the job. I flailed at his weapon, knowing I wouldn’t stop it in time.

I didn’t need to.

He fell with a cry as a large steel foot came down on him, pressing him into the concrete. There was a wet crunching sound, and his scream abruptly cut off. A service mech wasn’t quite heavy enough to make a pancake out of someone, but it had made a damn good go of it. He wouldn’t be getting up from that.

I stared up at my saviour seated in the mech’s open cockpit. The face that greeted me had never looked so divine.

Eh, who am I kidding? That face always looks divine. It was my face.

I scrambled up into the co-pilot’s seat, the canopy sealed shut, and the mech lurched into motion. This mech was hardly bulletproof. It could, however, run faster than we could. And right now, speed was what we needed.

Gunshots cracked on the other side of the warehouse. I didn’t like the idea of going towards a firefight, but there was nowhere else to go.

“You the original?” my clone asked as we lumbered around the side of the building. From the look of him, he was another fresh copy of me, not the one who had drowned. His clothes were the same as mine.

I nodded. “If I weren’t the original, do you think you’d still be here?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. And neither do you, seeing as you’re—”

A staccato burst of gunfire cut his words short. The canopy shattered. Something warm and sticky splashed across the side of my face, and ran down my neck. He jerked in his seat, then slumped forward, flopping limply as the mech lurched to a halt.

And just like that, another one of me disappeared. All that remained was a mangled seat, riddled with ragged bullet holes, and littered with broken glass and twisted metal. From what remained of his side of the cockpit, shredded steel spilled out onto rain-slicked gravel.

Again, my short-lived clone’s memories were now my memories. This time, reliving his death was a little easier. By no means pleasant, but not as crippling as the last couple of times it had happened. His memories diverged from mine at the exact same point in time as Franz’s. And that meant…

I shook my head. This wasn’t the time for navel-gazing. Gritting my teeth, I took stock of my situation. One of the mech’s arms had been torn clean off. The machine was close to tipping over on its side, revealing extensive structural damage to one of its legs as well. I peered through the shattered remnants of the canopy, and sucked in a breath.

On the other side of the fence loomed a heavily armoured, four-legged behemoth tank, sporting a pair of side-mounted miniguns. Multicoloured lights flashed in the night, revealing a line of patrol skimmers, behind which crouched a legion of enforcers in tactical gear. Torn bodies lay in the street, their blood staining the stormwater red.

As I’d suspected, it wasn’t the thugs from Quick-Load who had shot up the mech and killed my third clone. The enforcers were a different breed of thugs.

“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. “I’m unarmed!”

“Get out of the vehicle!” an amplified voice shouted from the tank’s loudspeaker. “Hands where we can see them!”